About

Why did I start a new blog?  Well, once upon a time my housemate made too-delicious vegan coffee ice cream and the rest is history.

Well, that and I realized that two of my passions—cooperative housing and low-car urban design—have a lot in common.  Both of them are environmentally efficient; the usual jargon for this is "sustainable", but more precisely what I mean is something like utility per resources used.  That is, on the surface one might think that I'm promoting an ascetic sort of environmentalism, in which we have to cut back in order to save the planet, our short-term happiness be damned; but I want to think that we can get better outcomes with fewer resources, that with the right sort of design, we can thrive on less, not just sustain ourselves.

And so, just as importantly: both of these things make humans happier.  Tastes vary, of course, but I think that streets and buildings scaled for people on foot rather than cars, life in makeshift villages rather than in nuclear families or alone is closer to the ideal of what Kaid Benfield calls "people habitat".  That our psychological makeup is still geared in some way towards life in hunter-gatherer bands and that my preferred lifestyle is somehow deeply reflective of this set of adaptations.

Being a visual and abstract thinker, I'm planning to focus mostly on design: describing historical decisions, critiquing existing designs, trying to design a way out of existing problems.  The most interesting problem to me is how we can make our houses, our streets, and our cities better fit the needs of more people.

Of course, the presumption with any blog manifesto is that I reserve the right to break it and talk about whatever the hell I want.